Work is never fun if you do it for other people.
But why?
I’d guess it’s not simply that someone else is asking you for it. It’s that the other person is *always* setting some constraints, defining the boundaries of what the thing should be, that don’t entirely line up with your own.
And then there’s a *disappointment*, a sense of the thing not being quite “right” as you have to cut and stretch the product to fit the Procrustean frame your client asks for.
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Mostly I think work is never fun when done for other people. Except there is work done for others that is fun. Fun is one way to describe what it feels like when a teacher encounters that Aha! moment in a student’s achievement. It looks to me you are having fun when you collaborate with your wife on her creations. So there are times when work is fun precisely because we’re doing it for and with others.
The relationships we have with others in the context of doing work are a big part of the disappointment we feel.
With 40 years from 1968 I’ve been in a sort of time warp this past year, re-reading lots of stuff I found important back in the day. Right now I’m reading Harvey Cox’s “The Secular City.” The book is religious. Cox (40+ years ago) thinks part of the problem with jobs nowadays is that over the years, especially in Protestant countries we attributed spiritual significance to them; thought of them as a “spiritual discipline.” He suggest the summons to work is, “not to a job, but to joy and gratitude in whatever he is doing.”
Right, I’m down with that. But how do we get there?
Not always true. Over the last couple of years I’ve been writing software on a voluntary basis for a voluntary organisation, and the feedback and suggestions from real users have made it interesting. However, because I’ve been the final arbiter of what gets done and and when it happens I guess it’s not typical of work done for an employer!
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